Victoria shook her head. “You can’t live like this. You can’t live that close to people that ugly, and not be affected by it. It’ll eat you alive. We’ve got to get you out of this house.”

Kenzie looked down, then looked back toward the door, where her family was on the other side.

“Then I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Help?”

“Absolutely,” Victoria said. “I’m going to call some people. You—call Ashley. She’s one of your favorite people, right, and she gets this? She figured stuff out or she had guesses.”

“She got a lot of it.”

“We’ll figure this out,” Victoria said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

Kenzie nodded, her expression solemn.

“Can I give you a hug, or—”

More than anything, Kenzie wanted one, even a one-armed hug.

But Victoria was a friend and the rules were that she didn’t hug friends. That threatened to cross boundaries.

“No,” Kenzie said. And she wished with all her might that Victoria would hug her anyway, because that wouldn’t break the rules if Kenzie wasn’t the one doing it. It would make things feel so much better.

There was no hug. Victoria listened when she said no.

Victoria got out her phone. Kenzie got hers, checking on her parents on her way to dialing the number. Ashley.

Ashley picked up on the other end, “How bad was it?”

A goofy grin crept across Kenzie’s face, that she couldn’t wipe away or get rid of, for what felt like minutes.

Torch Interlude 7.y

Gary Nieves was trying to save a world, and he was failing.

Twenty-six million people. The world had ended two years ago, and, as of last week, there were still twenty-six million people trying to survive on Earth Bet. The attacks had hit the portals, and some of the most accessible avenues between Earth B and Earth G had been wiped out.

He was pretty sure that they hadn’t been able to process more than a few million in the last week. Over twenty million people were out there, ready to file through with the things they could carry or pack. Many had been forced to relocate to other portals, after months of waiting for their turns at the portals in Earth B or equivalent areas in Earth B’s New York. Many found themselves at the back of the line at whatever stations they were forced to move to. Some would get on trains. Here, they had to get on trucks, because the portal was too narrow for anything else. The narrowness slowed things down more.